What Happened To The Superficial? Pt. 2 The Desolation of Blog
[A note from the author: As you read this account of The Superficial’s final days, it’s going to be very easy to view CPXi as the villain, especially considering this is from my perspective. But, I hope it’s clear that they genuinely made an effort to work with us, and I believe those efforts were in good faith. At the end of the day, they’re a business whose goal is to make money, and I’m an opinionated asshole whose goal is to extract money for those opinions. Eventually, those agendas would clash, and the state of the industry did not help at all. It was like buying a house in the middle of a hurricane and then finding out that the previous owners had replaced all of the wiring with snakes. Don’t get me wrong, I loved snake house with all of my heart, but I wasn’t the one footing the snake mortgage.]
When we left our heroes in Part One, the board of investors for SpinMedia wanted a sweet tax write-off for 2016, so the quickest way to do that was to fire everyone two days before Christmas and sell off sites at bargain basement prices while giving zero fucks about what happened to the people behind them. Think A Christmas Carol if A Christmas Carol ended with Scrooge strangling Bob Cratchit with his cane so Tiny Tim wasn’t eligible for COBRA.
That was the shit. What happened next is the fan.
The Battle of Christmas Eve
It’s Dec. 24, I just got officially fired the day before, and CPXI, a company I’ve never even heard of, now owns The Superficial along with The Frisky and Celebuzz. So I’m in total free fall even though CPXi has offered me my job back — as an independent contractor. (Read: Hi, I’m now a freelancer who’s stupid easy to fire.) All of this is pitched as a temporary solution to bring me on as quickly as possible so there’s no disruption to the site, which is my biggest concern at this point. Sure, the money is great, but it’s going to dry up real quick if I’m left holding a deflated testicle for a site. And that was a very pressing concern with Photo Boy still out in the cold and getting radio silence about being hired. On top of that, I’m learning that there are plans to dump random content from PressRoomVIP onto The Superficial today. Christmas Eve. Do these people not sleep? Do they hate their families? Goddammit.
Without disparaging PressRoomVIP, even though it looks defunct, or getting into its content strategy, which will play a pivotal role later in our story, the editorial is decidedly different from The Superficial. Glaringly so. But at this point, the reasoning wasn’t about immediately harvesting clicks from our maimed bodies, but to make it look like The Superficial is still active and everything’s fine.
“We don’t like gaps in content,” is what I was told when I noticed random posts being built in WordPress without my knowledge that, if published, would be huge red flags that The Superficial is absolutely not fine. If I stayed on, I’d be wading into a goddamn shit show the day after Christmas, and keeping the site alive would go from an uphill battle to trying to walk up the side of a building. Contrary to popular belief, I’m not Spider-Man nor do webs shoot out of my ass. I’ve tried.
I’m also baffled by the rationale behind this decision because, essentially, it’s like waltzing into a McDonald’s and thinking you can just replace orders with Taco Bell. People are gonna notice, and they’re gonna be pretty pissed. Also, if someone had asked me, I would’ve gladly told them that The Superficial doesn’t post on Christmas Eve. As far as the end user was concerned, everything was normal. This situation would get even more ridiculous when I later learned that all of the CPXi sites had “gaps in coverage.” Or in layman’s terms, they took the weekend and holidays off.
So I don’t know why this became a pressing concern the fucking day before Christmas, but it prompted me to do something I’ve never done in my entire life: I pulled a power move.
Now, before anyone thinks that I’m any sort of badass, know that it was probably the most politely worded power move in the history of power moves, and I immediately ate 25 Pepto-Bismols after I sent it. (Motherfucking Rambo over here.) But long story short, I said if random content gets posted on The Superficial, I’m out. The site will start bleeding users who are now fully aware that the editorial has been compromised, and that’s not a nosedive that I’m going to sit in the pilot seat for.
(However, I also offered to explore ways to organically promote CPXi sites down the road because helping out sister sites has always been my jam. Working for a digital media company is like being strapped to the same bomb together, so if there’s anything I can do to spit the fuse out, holla at ya boy.)
Anyway, after receiving my extremely cordial, pillowy-soft threat to bounce, CPXi blinked. They deleted the content in WordPress, and we all agreed to let things sit until after Christmas. Even better, there was movement on bringing Photo Boy back into the fold. Thank fucking God.
A Quick Flirt With The Gaping Maw That’s Killing Online Writing Dead
It’s now two days after New Year’s, and Photo Boy and I technically have our jobs back. Again, we’re both freelancers, but with the promise of that only being a 30-day Band-Aid. (It wasn’t.) On this particular day, we’re scheduled for a video conference call, the pronged Satan’s dick of corporate communications. Joining us will be a few CPXi execs and the other SpinMedia refugees who survived the crash. What we didn’t know until we joined the call is how little of those refugees there are. I’m talking maybe six editorial staffers made it over, and that’s counting us. Even more alarming, the editors-in-chief of Celebuzz and The Frisky were not among that group, which was especially jarring in the case of Celebuzz. Michael Prieve ran a clean, professional, advertiser-friendly operation with phenomenal traffic, so from my vantage point, Celebuzz should’ve been the crown jewel. Christ, I would’ve backed it over The Superficial without hesitating. But somehow here we are learning about our new home while all of us looked shellshocked as fuck because have I mentioned that we all got fired over Christmas?
Now, I’m not going to get into the proprietary nature of CPXi’s editorial strategy, but I am going to address a non-specific gamification of clicks that is murdering this industry right in the face. I’m talking about writing for the sole purpose of servicing an algorithm. Which isn’t even writing. It’s placing a pre-calculated number of words into a random sequence that will hopefully catch the attention of a machine. Even more depressing, the blander that content is, the more financially rewarding it will be. If an AI ever goes rogue after crawling the internet, the biggest threat to humanity is that it will kill us all with boredom.
“Hello, human, I am going to tell you 25 secrets about Michael Dudikoff. Unusual. Your face appears to be melting.”
(P.S. I just wrote Westworld Season 3. You’re welcome, HBO.)
So that’s a generalized view of the meat grinder we were told our sites would be tossed into later that month. On top of that, we learned that CPXi used the not uncommon practice of paying “influencers” to drive traffic, which was new for us, and put The Superficial in a very awkward position because our entire editorial strategy was based on mocking said “influencers” whenever they acted like assholes. For example, certain knocked-up teenagers who went on to become anal porn Christian authors.
Except here’s the weirdest part, not a goddamn thing happened after that call. While we sat in an existential daze polishing our resumes for when The Superficial got micromanaged into a soft turd and/or told to go easy on reality stars with social media accounts for sale, CPXi apparently decided not to do any of that crazy stuff. Although, without bothering to tell us. Instead, they rebranded as Digital Remedy, and then eventually started having productive conversations with us about keeping the site running as is.
We made concessions. They made concessions. It was honestly refreshing after spending two years on an island where SpinMedia left us to die. Things actually seemed like they might work out.
And then they took the Facebook page.
Memes… Why Did It Have To Be Memes?
By January 2017, it should have been painfully obvious that Facebook was no longer the traffic driver it used to be. At that point, it had seduced enough publications to bring their users inside and had long since slapped the gate shut behind them. You want to let a few out? It’s gonna cost you.
And while that’s an oversimplification of a festering bullet wound to this entire industry, and America while I’m at it, The Superficial Facebook page was goddamn magical. My stupid words will never do that gorgeous community justice, which is why it was a kick in the teeth when blatantly off-brand posts starting appearing on the page. I’m talking random-ass, uncredited memes with two word captions and/or emoji that I would never use if you put a gun to my head. Even worse, people thought I was posting them — or had been fired — because up until that point, I managed both the site and the Facebook page, so it was always on-brand. (Let me just stop for a second and say that I hate using the word “brand,” but in the context of social media management, it’s not an insignificant term.)
When I pushed back, I was told to let the social media team handle Facebook. There was apparently a lot of confusion about why I posted news stories or columns from sites that CPXi didn’t own just to start discussions? Was I actually interacting with these people instead of luring them in with memes and then spamming them with clicks? Haha, stupid boob blogger.
Eventually, I was allowed to start posting to Facebook again, but only once a day in the dead of night. Cool, cool. Also, there was some head-scratching over why I wanted to differentiate which posts were mine instead of letting users think that I say “it me” now or that I personally endorse links that literally only had two sentences per page so you had to go through 20 of them. (I’m trying real hard not to say clickbait.) These were not encouraging signs.
Nor was watching 30 days go by without our “temporary” freelance status being converted to full-time positions. And then another 30 days.
And, oh God, Photo Boy put in his notice…
CLICK HERE FOR PART THREE: THE WIPENING
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